Reducing data center cooling costs by actively controlling the cooling air circulating within the facility is a critical concern to data center administrators. To this end, technologies have been devised to adaptively cool the assets within the computer room, by portioning the level of cooling. In such cases, thermal measurements are required to provide feedback to the airflow control system and to ensure that inflow temperature conditions are being met; often a condition of asset warranties within managed facilities.
Some prior systems for measuring inlet temperature rely on an extensive overlay sensor array, or wired chains of discrete temperature systems, together with a data aggregation unit that feeds information regarding inlet and exhaust temperature readings to the cooling control system. However, the expense and complexity of wiring and configuring the solution is a significant cost. One server embeds inlet temperature sensors in the server thus providing an alternate to an overlay sensor solution. However, many recent and legacy assets do not contain inlet or exhaust sensors or a means to export such data. Devices that do have sensors often may have differing access protocols.
A further need within data center facilities is providing knowledge of individual asset locations and their operational status. Knowing the location of individual assets would enable operations staff to quickly locate a particular asset that may have been moved during a prior facilities reconfiguration. This is also a valuable assist when the facility's assets are audited, replacing a time consuming manual activity with a remotely controlled and automated alternative.
A number of indoor location technologies have been researched and developed, but their application within the data center environment remains challenging. Approaches that rely on RF signal strength (RSSI) measurement are problematic when deployed within aggressive indoor environments that contain multiple RF pathways, metallic surfaces, sources of RF noise, and which are conducive to the formation of standing wave conditions. Other developments include carrier-less RF systems (i.e. UWB) and combined RF and acoustic ranging techniques, both of which have been tested within data center-environments and need careful engineering to overcome noise related issues.
While the prior methods provide solutions to the problem of locating or monitoring assets within the data center, deployment, configuration and cost issues have prevented their widespread adoption and in some cases productization.